Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s Pointing Finger — on the Difficulty of Sorting Prejudice from Legitimate Criticism in Regard to President Obama — and How Bigotry Creates Talented Social Survivors but Simultaneously Forces their Boat-Rocking Strength into Hiding

© 2012 Peter Free

 

06 February 2012

 

 

Why write this essay on a stale pointing-finger incident?

 

 

It’s a back-handed example of the price of minority success in an often bigoted culture.

 

Below, I use Hazar Ghanbari’s photograph of Governor Brewer’s open disrespect for President Obama to address a topic that includes bigotry and something philosophically larger.

 

How we define and cultivate leadership matters.  But even our best efforts in a prejudiced society can backfire.

 

 

A general premise 

 

Life molds character in ways that frequently come back to haunt us.

 

Ancient Greece’s sense of tragedy in human affairs was well-founded.

 

 

This premise, as applied to President Obama

 

I see bigotry’s pruning effect in the extraordinarily talented Barrack Obama.  In successfully getting to the presidency as a black man, he had to abandon the boat-rocking traits that would have made him a genuinely admirable leader, once he attained it.

 

The same effect is visibly at play in the American military and many governmental organizations.

 

Mediocrity regularly triumphs over foresight, talent, and leadership strength.  As a general rule, the armed forces elevate butt-kissers and “go alongs, to get alongs” into command roles.  Most of these people are poster boys and girls for being just competent enough, but not so much so that they would reform a system that regularly cries out for improvement.

 

Mathematically speaking, because the majority of people are mediocre (by normative definition), we tend to form mediocre institutions that we populate and lead with ourselves.  It is a rare group that would cause itself pain by pitching its dominating mediocrities overboard.

 

The new person with talent is usually such a pain in the ass, that we get rid of him or her before she attains enough rank to cause the rest of us trouble.

 

The chameleon-like President’s early life in a prejudiced nation molded him into avoiding serious controversy, even as he rose to the highest rank in the land.  He had to lose the innate pot-stirring capacity that he would today need to lead America out of its problem-filled thicket.

 

President Obama is not a man who is now characterologically capable of taking on the Plutocracy or even its Military-Industrial Complex component.

 

The President has become what he professed to dislike.  This is not surprising, given that Success is defined by society’s elite.  It is pretty difficult to be successful and powerful at the same time, but outside the reigning system.

 

 

A general observation — bigotry’s effect on minority populations

 

Many of my most talented non-white friends cultivated a combination of intelligence, charm, diplomacy, consensus-building, and political cautiousness that allowed them to rise in rank within a culture predominantly dominated by whites.

 

The careers and influence of “angry” black or Hispanic men and women (for example) have historically been capped well below their potential.

 

Even so influential a person as Martin Luther King Jr. had to garb his message in the non-threatening pacifist envelope of love.  Contrast his widespread posthumous success (and even that was made outside the formal American system) with Malcolm X’s lack of the same.

 

 

So — why criticize someone whose Life made them what they are?

 

After voting for him, I have become one of the President’s critics.  My criticism has been based on what the country needs, as opposed to what the President’s character can apparently deliver.

 

But why criticize someone who cannot help but be the way they are?  Why scold a person whose very qualities got him to the extraordinarily successful position he or she occupies?

 

My answer has been that the nation’s survival needs take precedence over the President’s comfort — and mine in wanting to avoid being thought of as a bigot.

 

But how can we tell when our criticisms are reasonably substantive or simply motivated by bigoted disrespect?

 

 

Governor Jan Brewer — captured prejudice, or merely disrespectful pipsqueak-ism at play?

 

Associated Press photographer Hazar N. Ghanbari caught Arizona Governor Jan Brewer pointing a probably disrespectful finger in President Obama’s face about ten days ago:

 

Devin Dwyer, President Obama, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer Share Tense Tarmac Moment, ABC News (27 January 2012) (with lead AP photograph by Hazar N. Ghanbari)

 

 

How the confrontation between the President and Governor Brewer allegedly began

 

According to Brewer, the President (just off Air Force One) expressed disenchantment with an excerpt from her book, Scorpions for Breakfast.  He felt it unfairly portrayed his previous White House meeting with her in regard to immigration issues.

 

The Governor, not surprisingly, wanted to talk about something else.  It’s always more fun to lambast someone without having to talk to him or her about it later.

 

 

Not exactly the way I would act with the Commander-in-Chief

 

Perhaps it’s my background, but you don’t go around pointing a finger in close proximity to anyone’s face.

 

Even a brainless twit generally doesn’t jab a finger toward a general’s chin, no matter how annoying that commander might be.  Much less the nation’s President and Commander-in-Chief.

 

 

At issue, perhaps, is what the Governor Brewer was thinking

 

To the experienced political observer’s eye, the Governor’s explanations ooze with politically motivated fabrication:

 

I felt a little bit threatened, if you will, by the attitude that he had because I was there to welcome him . . . .

 

© 2012 Tommy Christopher, Drama Clubbed: Jan Brewer Says ‘I Felt A Little Bit Threatened’ By President Obama, MEDIAite (26 January 2012) (with embedded CNN video)

 

 

Threatened? — Hah

 

She should have felt threatened.

 

Any reasonable half-wit would be intimidated by openly disrespecting a leader with as much power as the President of the United States has.

 

Paradoxically, Governor Brewer’s overtly displayed disrespect demonstrates that she was not at all intimidated.  So, she is a liar and/or a drama queen.

 

 

Full circle — a man who learned to turn the other cheek in order to rise to the presidency, now is temperamentally incapable of bashing the Governor’s impertinence down

 

The President’s gracious public charm was on display, when he dismissed the incident as being overblown.

 

Huma Khan, Exclusive – Obama Says Encounter With Arizona Gov. ‘Blown Out of Proportion’, ABC News (26 January 2012) (embedded video)

 

In a culture that contains a determined undercurrent of wide-spread racism, the President has had no choice but not to make an issue of his political foes’ skin-motivated disrespect.

 

 

Regarding the President’s allegedly “prickly” nature

 

Wouldn’t you be prickly, too, if you had had to hide years of accumulated anger at being underestimated, simply because you were black?

 

Not only has the President had to avoid head-bashing on his way to the top, he has mostly had to reign in his temper with those who most deserve its fury.

 

That’s a difficult place to be for a person with obvious gifts.

 

 

The moral? — It is difficult being the first black President

 

People of color are always stymied by white racists’ ability to pretend that their disrespect comes from something other than unexamined prejudice.

 

It is challenging, too, being white and attempting to criticize the President for substantive lapses in his performance, without coming across as a racist.

 

My enthusiasm in voting for our first African-American president remains, even though the character he (probably necessarily) brought to the job was not what I had been hoping for.

 

Is this tragedy in the Shakespearean sense?  Or simply the way things are?  If the latter, there is no tragedy.  Tragedy requires at least a sprinkling of freedom of will, or its illusion.

 

On the positive side, even if President Obama is voted out of office in November 2012, he will still have done something that virtually no one else on the planet could have.  That, in itself, is an immense personal and History-benefiting achievement.

 

I increasingly think that our often bigoted culture has to bear the responsibility for this remarkable man’s current inability to meet the leadership demands that History imposed on him as the price of his ambition.

 

In a philosophical and de-personalized sense, “we” made President Obama the political Alpha Man that he is and the leader that he is not.

 

That may not be tragedy, but it is a sad waste of human and national potential.

 

Bigotry is a subtly all-embracing evil.